MusicKeyboard

Musical Keyboard Applet
by David Rantanen
version 1.3

Notes (no pun intended)

• The applet must load 20 sound files so it will take a little while for the applet to work if you have a slow internet connection.
• The sound is not hi-fi... Sound files used in Java applets are limited to a very low sample rate: 8kHz. That's less than one fifth the sample rate that audio CDs use. Furthermore, they must be mono, mu-law encoded, and in Sun's .au format.
• Chords can be played simply by pressing multiple keys at once. However, not all key combinations will work, due to hardware limitations of computer keyboards. If your computer beeps at you, chances are that you're pressing a combination of keys that your computer can't handle.

About the tools I used to make it

I wrote this applet in the summer of 1999 to practice my Java skills, using Symantec's Visual Cafe as the programming environment. However, when I rewrote it to use the older JDK 1.0 API (so more browsers could play it) I had to do a lot of hand coding...

To make the 20 sound files (a separate one is needed for each note) I used "Cool Edit 96" to sample notes from my sound card's MIDI synthesizer, and edit them. (And to make those MIDI notes, I created a MIDI file using an old version of "Midisoft Studio for Windows" designed for Windows 3.1 -- but it still works, even on Windows 98.)

Back to the MusicKeyboard applet page

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